LDS Hospital Pulls a Do Over

Di Lewis

September 13, 2012

After more than a century in business, LDS Hospital has renovated and rebranded itself, decreasing beds and trying to provide even more personalized care, said Jim Sheets, CEO/administrator of LDS Hospital.

After Intermountain Healthcare opened their medical center in Murray and closed Cottonwood Hospital five years ago, Sheets said LDS Hospital become different. It had previously been the large hospital for the Intermountain system. Then, Sheets said, they were faced with deciding the hospital’s new role.

Because hospitals never close, it can be a challenge to do any work on them, but Intermountain chose to invest $32 million to renovate and improve the lobby and patient care areas, he said.

With the “grand re-opening,” the hospital reduced beds from 450 to 212, and began a rebrand as an “elite community hospital.”

“One of the challenges when you’re a larger hospital is you have an institutional feel because you’re so big,” Sheets said. “…We created an identity that said we do highly personalized care in an extraordinary way. That’s something we do, something you can do when you’re a little bit smaller.”

The hospital also chose to honor its history with a large painting of the hospital as it looking in 1905, and a hall showing the history of the building.

Sheets said they are done with capital investment and have no other plans for the immediate future. “We’re not looking to add new services. We’re going to focus on what we do and do it well.”

Sheets said he was also proud of LDS Hospital being ranked in the top 100 hospitals in the country for women’s services and the top hospital in the state by U.S. News and World Report, as well as being ranked in the top 50 for women’s services by Becker’s Hospital Report.